Category: News

Posted on

SF says celebrity chef walked away from two Union Square cafes

By Patrcik Hoge : sfexaminer – excerpt (audio)

Celebrity chef Tyler Florence stepped away from a role operating two cafes in Union Square last week right before the start of the NBA All-Star weekend, according to San Francisco officials who nevertheless said the downtown shopping district put on a good show for tourists in town for the basketball event and associated attractions.

As a result of Florence’s departure, city officials hastily recruited a celebrated local baker who provided pastries over the weekend and on Tuesday at one of the two kiosks leased by The City to Florence, though the woman said she did not know what would happen going forward.

Florence’s company was granted a three-year lease for The City’s properties in 2023. Efforts to get comment from Florence or someone at his company were unsuccessful…

As with the recent NBA All-Star Game, Breed and others at the time were eager for The City to put a favorable foot forward for another high-profile gathering, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, as well as for the winter holidays.

To that end, The City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development gave Florence a grant of $440,000 to get the eateries up and running. The award rankled some who said the money had been earmarked for revitalizing lower Powell Street.

City supervisors last year subsequently voted to accept $2 million more in state grant money for upgrading the restaurant kiosks that Florence took over… (more)

Ever wonder where those millions are coming from and where they are going? Here are some hints for those who care to follow up on them.
Posted on

Airbnb founder now working with Musk; here’s who was on his side in SF when it mattered

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

You know you are repeating past mistakes when past warnings confirm the threats of the past were real.  This video was shot at one of the first Airbnb demonstrations held in SF about a decade ago. All the warnings were ignored. And now here we are being overtaken by the cute little struggling tech startups we warned against. And who was around to campion them?

Breed, Chiu, and Wiener helped make Joe Gebbia a billionaire; now he’s helping destroy democracy in the US.
 

Now that Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb, is joining Elon Musk’s attempt to dismantle the federal government, I would like to remind everyone of a little history.

Airbnb was started in San Francisco, and for its first few years, every single listing in this city was illegal. The company’s entire business model was illegal. It was also deeply damaging to tenants, many of whom lost their homes so the place could be turned into a hotel room…

Ed Lee was the mayor. He did nothing, nothing, to enforce the city laws against short-term rentals. Airbnb was a tech company; the mayor loved tech companies. His administration also did nothing to stop Uber and Lyft, which were violating city law every single day.

In those days, if you were a tech startup, you didn’t have to worry about local laws. Move fast, break things; it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Never mind if you are ruing the lives of low-income renters and struggling cab drivers; they don’t count… (more)

Not much has changed except the coddled cute little techies that needed room to grow have outgrown SF and jumped from local to state to national destruction. When is enough enuf? Share this one if you can.

Posted on

San Francisco’s Right-Wing Tech Bros Go National

By Lincoln Mitchell : excerpt

Many of the acsendant crypto-goniffs in Washington have roots in San Francisco.

As recently as a few years ago many would have indentified San Francisco as the capital of liberal, or at least Democratic, America. The Vice-President was from the Bay Area and had gotten her start in elected office in San Francisco. One former mayor of San Francisco was the governor of California and an emerging national leader of the Democratic Party. Another former mayor was an aging, but groundbreaking, US Senator. The Speaker of the House and longtime leader of her party in that chamber was San Francisco’s congresswoman. This was still a time when people would, inaccurately, say things like a conservative in San Francisco was a radical in the rest of America.

Over the last few years, something began to change. In San Francisco, right-wing politics reemerged, initially in the form of self-styled feel-good civic groups sneaking conservative messaging into other fora-come for the garbage clean-up and the opportunity to mingle with other young singles, and stay for the right-wing spin about San Francisco…(more)

First thing they said was, “Parking isn’t a right it is a privilege.” Second thing they said was, “Disruption is good before it forces change.” After that the systems all fell apart. If the author is right, the country  will soon look like San Francisco. We were the Petri dish.

 

Posted on

NEWSOM JUST QUIETLY FLOATED AN IDEA THAT COULD HELP FIX CALIFORNIA’S HOUSING AND FIRE RECOVERY CRISES

By Ben Metcalf : sfchronicle – excerpt (audio track)

Rebuilding after the Los Angeles fires is going to be time-consuming and expensive. Accordingly, much attention has been given to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent executive actions to speed up the process and cut red tape, including by waiving environmental reviews, sidestepping Coastal Commission oversight and providing additional state resources to city and county planning and building officials

However, a different and little-noticed idea from the governor, included as part of his budget proposal to the Legislature early in January, also has the potential to be impactful. A small paragraph teases a big vision for housing: a new California housing and homelessness agency.

This proposed agency — which would replace the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency that oversees a kitchen sink of other state functions (such as horse racing and cannabis regulation) — promises instead a “more integrated and effective” administrative framework for addressing the state’s housing and homelessness challenges. It would oversee all of the existing housing entities and be tasked with leading the state’s response on aligning housing policies with transportation, climate and community planning… (more)

We need to look into the process for creating and dissolving state agencies because that is what Newsom is suggesting. What happens to the staff? We might want to talk to them.

What is the connection between an agency that oversees Business, Consumer Services and Housing and one that oversees Housing and Homelessness issues. Are they eliminating state oversight of Business and Consumer Services, combing them with other agency, or setting up a new oversight agency?

The new agency just adds climate and community planning to housing and transportation. How does combining “housing policies with transportation, climate and community planning” solve homelessness? Is this a ploy to circumvent CEQA more than they already have?

This makes no sense unless it is a power play. Once again the state wants to force change on us and is eliminating some basic services and oversight we need in the process.

Once again our state representatives are trying to control us while eliminating the basic services and oversight we need.

Posted on

Homeless families sent eviction notices from S.F. shelters

by XUEER LU : missionlocal – excerpt

Karina Ortiz, a 26-year-old living in the Salvation Army Harbor House homeless shelter with her husband and seven-year-old daughter, will be evicted in March — the same month that she is due to give birth to a baby boy.

On the morning of Jan. 21, Ortiz stood in Room 200 of City Hall, joined by a half dozen other families also facing eviction. The group handed a staffer a letter demanding a meeting to address their urgent needs and asking the mayor to rescind the evictions.

These families all received an eviction letter with the operative date of Feb. 8 or 10 — about three weeks away. Ortiz managed to get a one-month reprieve.

The eviction notices came as a result of a change in policy from the San Francisco Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing in December. Under the new policy, homeless families are now only permitted to stay in city shelters for 90 days; previously, they could stay indefinitely. For families unable to get housing subsidies, this will put them back onto the street…

San Francisco has 405 families — 1,103 people — experiencing homelessness, according to the city’s point-in-time count report in 2024. However, the count is not accurate and tends to be an undercount…

“I’m very worried because we don’t have any place to go,” said Maria Zavala, a 37-year-old mother of three children in tears. Zavala’s family is living off of her husband’s biweekly garbage collector salary of $1,300. The family of five is cramped in a room with two sets of bunk beds. She said she can’t work because she needs to take care of her disabled six-year-old daughter full-time. … (more)

If San Francisco Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing can’t take care of 405 families by resending a decision to evict them, it is hard to believe that department will do much for the thousands of homeless who are living on the street. This seems like something our new mayor could fix in a flash by resend that decision.

Posted on

Lurie Rolls Out Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance, But Supervisors’ Dissent Already Brewing

By Joe KuKura : sfist – excerpt

New SF Mayor Daniel Lurie introduced his “Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance” on Tuesday, but there’s already some pushback, as it hands out no-oversight money to department heads to create potential for Mohammed Nuru-type self-dealing.

When San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie was inaugurated last Wednesday, Heather Knight’s New York Times dispatch had a scoop. “His declaration of a fentanyl emergency,” Knight wrote, “will speed its way to the Board of Supervisors, akin to a City Council, on Tuesday for what is expected to be swift approval.”

But that’s not exactly what happened. The legislation was not ready for a Board of Supervisors vote Tuesday (there may have been pushback from the City Attorney on some if its specifics, we’ll probably never know). It was merely “introduced” on Tuesday with no vote. And the Board’s response indicates this “swift approval” may not be as swift as hoped…

But Lurie’s ordinance already has opponents on the board.

“I guess we’re doing something kind of new at Roll Call today and expressing our support for initiatives — or in my case lack of support,” Supervisor Shamann Walton said. “During COVID, we gave emergency powers to the mayor with the presence of a specific plan. Right now we have legislation that requests waiving processes and allowing for swift decision-making, but we don’t have a plan in front of us.”…

Mission Local has been stressing for a couple months that, legally speaking, this is not an actual “Fentanyl State of Emergency.” They point to the language defining SF state of emergency orders, which notes that “The situation must be something that the City could not have specifically anticipated and prevented, such as an earthquake or a terrorist attack.” We’ve known fentanyl has been here for years, which is why London Breed’s 2021 attempt to declare a fentanyl state of emergency was renamed as a “Tenderloin state of emergency.”… (more)

Posted on

Rafael Mandelman is San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors president

By Joe Eskenazi : missionlocal – excerpt

Watching the Board of Supervisors elect its president often feels a bit like observing a live-action game of three-card monte. There’s ever so much twirling about and, until the cup is lifted, you don’t know where the votes are going to be.
Today, however, the political legerdemain took place off-camera. After several furious days of votes being whipped and deals being brokered, District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman ended up being the sole nominee for the position. And, lo, he won.
There’s a lot of cachet in being board president, because it’s a position that has great possibilities. If Mayor Daniel Lurie is hit by a meteor, or runs off and joins the French Foreign Legion, for instance, Mandelman will be your new mayor. And it could happen: In just 2017, Mayor Ed Lee was felled by a heart attack while in the frozen-foods section of the city’s worst Safeway, and Board President London Breed was the next woman up…

So, Mandelman is board president, having been the sole nominee. But expect Melgar to oversee the County Transportation Authority and its billions of dollars in transit monies. Expect Melgar to also accept the mixed blessing of helming the land-use committee.
Why did this happen? Mandelman is perceived by his colleagues as more predictable than Melgar in his votes, for good or ill, and more willing to make deals. The bloc of left-leaning supervisors is counting on it; it will be lost on nobody that he is in this position because of their votes. Expect Connie Chan, who successfully lobbied her colleagues for Mandelman, to remain budget chair…(more)
Posted on

New audit shows serious contracting problems at the SFPUC

By Tim Redmond : missionlocal – excerpt

Under the now-jailed general manager, proper safeguards were missing, Board of Supes report shows. That’s why voters approved an inspector general.

San Francisco will soon have an Office of the Inspector General, with a mandate to investigate and expose corruption in city agencies. Proposition C, which authorized the new office, passed with about 60 percent of the vote in November, and soon Controller Greg Wagner will appoint someone to run it. The mayor and the supes have to approve the appointment.

In the meantime, Sup. Dean Preston has asked the Budget and Legislative Analyst to conduct audits of all the city departments that have the authority to sign public works contracts.

Six department heads—at the SFPUC, the Airport, the Port, the Recreation and Parks Department, the SF Municipal Transportation Authority, and the Department of Public Works—have that authority.

That practice has caused some serious problems in the past, and the former director of the SF Public Utilities Commission is now in prison for abusing it. So is the former head of DPW… (more)

Posted on

City of San Francisco set to close parking site for homeless living in vehicles

KPIX CBS News

This is a problem that someone should be able to fix as soon as the new administration steps in.

We understand there is a well-managed private RV park close by that cost less to operate than the city managed one. Perhaps there is someone better able to manage this safe parking site and our new Mayor will find that person in time to save it. Trailer parks are a perfectly legal and widely accepted lifestyle for many. Why San Francisco opposes them is somewhat of a mystery.